We all know the answer, of course. And it bears on the question of the unpalatable abuse of the patent system. Why do these people do it? Same answer.
I was working with CAMBIA’s Patent Lens team on the forthcoming ‘landscape’ of patents around plant genes, and stumbled on a newly published patent application. It didn’t list the owner / assignee / applicant…just the inventors and their law firm. But I recognized one of the inventors (and the address, near St. Louis, was a giveaway) and a moment’s Googling confirmed it. Imagine my surprise!
Monsanto figures very prominently in the patent landscape, having filed countless wholesale sequence patents either directly or through their proxy companies, like Mendel Biotechnology, covering genes and promoters from rice, Arabidopsis, maize, cotton, soybean and presumably daffodils and snapdragons. But this patent application, US 2007/67865 A1, which had been hidden from view for years really grated (It dates from a US utility application from 2000, before publication was standard, and only published in 2007).
It claims about 463,173 separate annotated plant genes. Actually it claims exactly that many. Oh and it discloses them too, sort of, although the gargantuan file from the USPTO seems somehow corrupt. Matches the practice I guess.